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Coates and Scarry are pleased to announce a new show of paintings by Armando Mariño opening at Gallery 8 in London on Wednesday 4 October 2016.

Born in Cuba, now living in New York, Armando Mariño is an internationally celebrated painter, sculptor and installation artist. Drawing from his Cuban roots, his experience of dislocation and popular culture, Armando Mariño's poignant yet vibrant images, by turns melancholic and hallucinatory, explore the psychological and physical spaces between stories and truth, wandering and settling, becoming and being. Solitary figures and large lush landscapes evoke the grand narrative of migration and the vivid palette and large scale approach are unequivocal and cathartic.

The body of work shown in New Paintings is rooted within the social and political stories of migration – enormous and dangerous journeys made across land and sea. The image of the traveller or wanderer that can be found within the paintings make reference, not only to these individuals but to Mariño’s own movements across the globe. Visions of a sumptuous and tranquil paradise, reflections of dark lakes, droplets of water, sparkles of light and lone figures, give works such as The Wanderer and The Sea Walker (both 2016) the longing and poignancy of a half-remembered memory or a dream.

Each of Mariño’s finished canvases begins with a number of paintings on paper. Moving between oil and watercolour, these studies are the places where the artist’s ideas first come to life – where formal aspects of the work such as the composition, colour and surface details are worked out and eventually fixed. The works on paper are a crucial part of Mariño’s research process and have a degree of intensity and subtlety, exploring several of the artist's major themes, that make them important works in their own right.

Mariño builds up each of his paintings with multiple layers of oil paint. Beginning with a foundation of cadmium yellow or orange, painstakingly layered until a vibrancy is achieved. Despite the traditional medium, Mariño likens the hues he works with to those that can be found in films, video games and advertising – super-saturated digital colours that fizz and pop, connecting to our contemporary way of viewing the world. Colour is essential to the work, indeed, Mariño has described painting as an idea that uses colour in order to speak.